Apple Core, Baltimore, Forevermore

Hey! It's another newsletter from "A Way with Words," which this week was called "entertainingly erudite" by William Safire in the New York Times. Suh-weet!

Our latest erudition came in the form of talk about "apple core, Baltimore," a game in which you throw apple cores at other people. Huh. Weird. Also, we talked about "dude," pareidolia (find out!), "finna go," two kinds of "rooting," and more.

We've started posting our minicasts a little later in the week, so you may have missed the latest installment of Martha's look into regional English. Where would you be if you decided to go twacking around duckish, and then you came home and wrote about it in a scribbler?

So maybe we don't remember our childhood as well as we think we do. A lot of you recalled the cartoon characters "Chip and Dale" playing the "apple core, Baltimore" game, but we'll be derned if we'd ever heard of it. Watch that Disney cartoon here:

Steve at the blog Languagehat beat us to the punch with a review of the superb two-volume "The Oxford History of English Lexicography." We enjoyed this work because we're dictionary nerds, though it helped that they sent us a free copy. We agree with Steve: it's great.

If you're looking for word puzzles to keep you happy, then Roy Leban's site is the one for you. Roy was a contestant on our slang quiz a while back but we're recommending this site because it's fun. (An adjective. It's very fun. See? Easy.)

By the way, here's William Safire's latest column. Grant gave him some research assistance with the term "pay to play," and by way of thanking him, Safire plugged the show with kind praise. Oh, blushfulness!